152 r f'RICES SLIGHTLY HIGHER IN THE WEST. " \!. Jk 300- Tllfk VILLAGER'S tuck-front shift... only, this time, the tucking stops short below the waist. The nice weighty cotton is decorated with small bunches of flowers . . . petunia, bachelor's button, phlox . . . colored in brilliant paintbox Reds and Blues. Hoover collar, long cuffed sleeves, and a sash to knot or not. Sizes 6 to 16. A bout twenty dollars at good stores and college shops 1407 Broadway, New York @THE VILLAGER INC., 1963 NOTES FOR A GAZETTEER XLIV-LAR.AMIE, Wyo. "" ;.- AL T, 7,165. Pop., 17,520. Hu- ..L'l. morists are underfoot all over Laramie and vicinity, and con- stitute a major hazard. The big joke is the jackalope, a creature with the body of a jack rabbit and the antlers of a small deer. ] ackalopes are to be seen mostly in bars, stuffed, the antlers carefully pasted onto the rabbit. They are almost always good for a laugh, standing up there on their hind legs above the bar, and have been preserved expressly, it seems, for the bewilderment of Eastern- ers. In Laramie, Easterners are people who live east of Wyoming. "We usual- ly let an Easterner get about three- quarters of the way through his second drink before pointing casually at a jack- alopL," a L(;lramie wit saId not long ago. " 'Might} interesting little creature,' we usually say. 'Good God! \Vhat is it?' asks the Easterner. 'J ackalope,' we say, still casual, and order him another drink. Generally, some time elapses while the Easterner keeps staring above the hare 'Never saw one before in my life,' the Easterner eventually. says. 'You never will, ex- cept around here,' we say. 'They are very shy, have singsong voices, and are excellent mimics. Can mimic anything.' You'd be surprised how far you can carry the joke, but sooner or later one of these fellows will take another long look at the jackalope and say , 'You know, I think that's a jack rabbit with antlers on top.' Then he buys drinks for us." The high wInds of the area are conversation stoppers, too. The standing joke is that if you seed your garden in y\r yomIng, something sprouts in Nebraska, having been borne eastward by the gusts. There are many variations, in Laramie, on the old saw about its being not the heat but the humidity "It can be fifty-two de- grees below zero out here in the winter- tIme, but we hardly fe-el it," a Laramie residen t will tell an Easterner. "Low humIdity, perhaps fifteen per cent, does h . k " t e tnc . I t is often hard to tel] in Laramie where a joke begins or ends, or even whether it is intended as a joke at all. No one can be certain, for instance, whether the proprietors of the Paradice \ {\ ') cO 'I Bar, the Bird Cage Saloon, the Buffalo Bar, the Cowboy Bar, the Golden Spike C afé, and the Buckhorn Bar are trying to be funny, are being self-consciously Western, or have simply picked what seemed to them the hest possible names. The Cowboy Bar has more to commend it than its name, having been involved in a celebrated episode concerning a run- away truck. Although the incident was no joke at the time, and still requires a rather broad sense of humor to qualIfy for the comedy bracket, many Laramie people tend to tel] the story lighthearted- ly. "Y\T ay back around 1950, this huge truck was coming down Sh-erman Hill on Route 30, just east of town," a Lara- mie man said recently. "It's a steep, twisty descent-from eighty-eight hun- dred and seventy-eight feet at the top of the road, at Summit Overlook, right by the hig Ahe Lincoln monument-and If you don't come down in gear, you're crazy. \\T ell, this truck got out of control and just careered down the hill, honking like a fiend, with the driver praying oth- er cars would get out of his way. Nine cars didn't, and he roared down the hill and into town, past the U niver- sity, past the Hotel Con- nor, and crash-ed into the window of the Co\vboy Bar. This stopped him, finally . No casualties." The runa- way truck is almost as much a staple of con- versation in Laramie as jackalopes, and it is dif- ficult to hang around town for more than a few hours without hear- ing about it. "One good thing about that run- é:.way truck," a LaramIe man may suddenly re- mark to a stranger. "It made the au- thorities put in runaway-truck cutoffs on Sherman Hill. Now, if a truck gets out of hand, the dnver can turn her off the hill onto one of these cutoffs, which have an upgrade and will bring the truck to a halt. There's a little good f h . " can come out 0 anyt Ing. 9' M ANY Laramie residents feel that the scenerv around Laramie- the timbered, often white slopes of the Medicine Bow Range (part of the Rockies), to the west, and the gleaming Rockies of Colorado, to the south-pro-